Category: Nicotine | Page 2

Tobacco’s healing properties

“…it certainly isn’t healthy to smoke tobacco, and the vast majority of the tobacco smoked in the world is certainly not part of any ritual, indian or otherwise. It’s just a dirty and rather pointless habit, but if anyone wants to smoke it that’s fine by me. The whole point of this site is to denounce Nicotine Replacement Therapy as a scam which the Department of Health already know from their own research doesn’t work any better than willpower in the long run. I’m also calling for Champix to be banned, because anyone with half a brain can easily see that it should be.”

by Chris Holmes

This message came in by email the other day:

Austrian Smokers rights wrote:
Tobaco is a wonderful indian ritual and healing plant: would you please take this skul and bones of “nicotine”; and replace it by Chmapix or NicVax the killing vaccines.

thanks
chritsine

Now, Austrian Smokers’ Rights have had a little pop at me before, for the same reason that the Ashtray Blog bloke did, who is a devotee of the electronic cigarette… because I had the temerity to suggest that nicotine is just a useless poison. Poisons are usually denoted by the symbol of the skull and crossbones, so it seems appropriate. True, the same symbol should be on the Champix packaging in my view – I’ll suggest it to Pfizer’s Head of Marketing next time we meet up for a beer. NicVax I know nothing about – yet. But the idea that a vaccine will fix a compulsive habit like smoking seems very dubious to me.

As for tobacco being “a wonderful indian ritual and healing plant”, that is an unusually positive view of it nowadays, to say the least! But if Christine is assuming that I am anti-tobacco or anti-smoking, she hasn’t read much of this site and has missed the point of it. I’m not pro-tobacco, but I am very liberal about what people do to themselves, even if it kills them. Mountaineering kills people, but I wouldn’t sign a petition to get it banned, would you?

Just because something is used in a ritual doesn’t mean it has any useful aspect to it. Humans and animals have both been sacrificed in rituals in the past, but that doesn’t make human or animal sacrifice a worthy thing. Rituals are not necessarily a good thing anyway, because they are simply repetiton of an act without questioning it, which can lead to all kinds of mad mucking about: look at that daft nonsense with Black Rod and the opening of the English Parliament – how silly is that?

Tobacco might possibly inhibit the development of Alzheimers, and prevent endometrial cancer. But the list of diseases it causes is far longer than that, so it certainly isn’t healthy to smoke tobacco, and the vast majority of the tobacco smoked in the world is certainly not part of any ritual, indian or otherwise. It’s just a dirty and rather pointless habit, but if anyone wants to smoke it that’s fine by me.

The whole point of this site is to denounce Nicotine Replacement Therapy as a scam which the Department of Health already know from their own research doesn’t work any better than willpower in the long run. I’m also calling for Champix to be banned, because anyone with half a brain can easily see that it should be.

My book is the first to explain what cravings really are, and why they have no connection to nicotine whatsoever. It also explains how we hypnotherapists routinely shut down all kinds of cravings without any difficulty just about every working day of our lives, including smokers’ cravings.

I didn’t write the book for the Austrian Smokers’ Rights group, though. I wrote it for any ordinary smoker who would like to quit but hasn’t found that easy, and anyone who is interested in hypnotherapy and the Subconscious mind. So the skull and crossbones stay, no apologies.

the book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

This Blog is about Nicotine, Not Champix!

by Chris Holmes

OK it is time to get focussed! When I launched the Truth Will Out Campaign back in March 2008, it was to blow the whistle on the Global Nicotine Scam, not to spend the rest of my working life discussing Champix… or Chantix to give it the alias it goes by in the United States. Varenicline. Doesn’t matter what you call it, it still doesn’t work very well unless what you’re after is a mental breakdown and the loss of everything that is dear to you.

That drug is based upon the notion that smokers smoke because of nicotine – an idea which doesn’t stand up to any serious scrutiny, it’s just that no-one was scrutinising it until I published Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was in 2007.

Since then, a study done by Dr Reuven Dar from Tel Aviv University’s Psychology Department (link follows) has confirmed exactly what I was saying in that book: namely that smokers’ cravings are not withdrawal symptoms, and indeed are not related to nicotine levels in any way. Smoking is NOT a drug addiction, it just looks like one if you don’t know the difference between an addiction and a compulsive habit. And doctors currently do not, which is why I wrote the book. To understand the difference, you need to understand how the human Subconscious mind organises and repeats compulsive habitual behaviour. As a hypnotherapist, I’ve spent more than a decade shutting down habits like that with hypnotherapy, usually in one session.

I have done that with thousands of individuals, one at a time. It is not a trick. It is not a parlour game. It is a process of communication and anyone can respond to it if they choose. It is all explained in the book – available as a paperback (£16.95) or a download (£5). The fact is, both Champix Chantix and Nicotine Replacement Products are all based on a myth in the first place, and that is why they usually fail. Shame that smokers usually blame themselves for that failure, when they should be blaming those lousy methods!

the book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

The Science

more about hypnotherapy
…and then there is this! We are quite simply right about this. Sorry, Doc! Sorry, NiQuitin! The Nicotine Tale turned out to be an embarrassing medical error leading to a collosal global scam.

Spanish Nicotine Costa Packet!

I was interested to hear from a British ex-pat who has resided in Spain for most of the last ten years that the cost of Nicotine Replacement Poisoning in Spain has shot up during the time they were living out there. Apparently a packet of 105 pieces of delicious poison gum had gone from 16.35 Euros in the late 1990s to 27.70 Euros roundabout now.

by Chris Holmes

She also told me that you cannot buy NRT just anywhere in Spain, like you can here. As I said in an earlier post on this blog, I’ve seen NRT on sale in the UK in Pound shops (where everything on sale only costs one pound), which suggests that it is not in great demand! The wasteful U.K. government ‘initiative’ of providing free patches for a week (courtesy of the UK taxpayer) that ran at the start of 2011 also suggests that the sale of NRT is seriously flagging here, and I sincerely hope that the Truth Will Out Campaign has played a part in that over the last 3 years!

In Spain, however, you can only buy NRT from the Pharmacies, which pretty much makes it a racket. Don’t bother, people, it doesn’t work anyway! 94% failure (see home page). Hypnotherapy, acupuncture, Allen Carr method – all far more successful if you want to quit smoking.

the book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

more about hypnotherapy option

The British Broadcasting Corporation

Forget The Journalists

I was contacted by the BBC back in December, they were doing a radio programme about current smoking policy and questioning the validity of Nicotine Replacement Poisoning and all that, and wanted me to take part. The Producer had read my book, and really liked it. So I went and did an interview, which they assured me afterwards went very well. (I know: they say that to everybody!) Then it went very quiet, and I sent a couple of emails that didn’t get answered. The radio show is being broadcast today. And today I finally got a reply.

Guess what? I’m not in it!

This is the fourth time that I have been approached, and then before anything is actually broadcast, ditched – by media organisations. And it’s the last. Of course I got a detailed ‘explanation’ as to why, but the fact is I don’t care. I’m wasting my time with these people.

I’m not even disappointed, it’s pretty much what I expected at this point. As this is the fourth time journalists have approached me, then backed right off because I’m actually calling the Department of Health, A.S.H. and the drug companies a bunch of fraudsters who are knowingly wasting huge amounts of public money and carefully lying about it – and I can prove it – well, journalists are not in a position to deal in terminology like that. So I’ve had enough of talking to them.

I’m not a campaigner by nature. I’ve never done anything like this before, so it’s a learning process. And what I’ve learned is: don’t waste your time with journalists. They’re not interested in the real issue, they’re just constructing “items” for the shows (or rags) they knock together, and it’s pretty formulaic. I know how it works, I spent six years teaching a course on television production at Manchester Metropolitan University. I’ve been on TV numerous times (not in connection with this Campaign), and it’s all good fun. But that’s all it is.

The Producer of The Radio Show I Was Never On asked me if I wanted an audio copy of the show anyway, because she would “value my feedback on it”.

That made me feel very special. So I said: “Thank you very much”, and “no”. I already knew who else they had on the show, and I already know what all those people would say, because I’ve heard it all before. In fact the only bit that the listeners wouldn’t have heard before was the bit I contributed, which was why it didn’t really fit in.

Fact is, the internet is where all the real, edgy debate is now. The BBC is like the NHS: no-one who values their job can speak out, they’ve got to cover their own arses and let’s face it, the BBC is totally reliant on the government of the day to keep on approving the licence fee, so…

So: bye bye BBC. It’s been… well, pretty much what I expected, really!

the book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

Central Hypnotherapy

Volume II of Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was

Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was (Volume II) A Change of Mind has just become available today.

Read what the critics thought of Volume I:

“The author’s case is simple: nicotine is not addictive, and he makes a
strong case in support of his argument… Numerous asides to various issues
undoubtedly made for a more entertaining read… It’s not often that parts
of a book on a very serious subject have me by turns howling in laughter and
clapping in appreciation of the author’s attention to detail – this one did
both. This has the potential to be a landmark book, and as such deserves a
wide audience.”
Michael O’Sullivan, Hypnotherapy Articles

“Holmes provides “Case Mysteries” as interludes between his chapters and
these are highly entertaining and illuminating. One such interlude
de-constructs the work of Allen Carr, a British smoking cessation guru. By
the time Holmes is done with Carr, there is not much left; it’s a great read
that made me laugh out loud… in the end, the arguments make sense. Just as importantly, they are presented in an entertaining and insightful way,
making this book useful to hypnotists and those who would like to stop
smoking. I’d like to check out Volume II when I get a chance.”
James Hazlerig, RealHypnosisReviews.blogspot.com

Well here it is, James – and only two years late! Enjoy.

If you just want to quit smoking in two hours, read this.

Free Poison Patches From Your Friendly Pharmacist!

…courtesy of the U.K. taxpayer, of course… the latest mad idea for wasting NHS cash, have you heard about this one? Free patches from the chemist for 1 week “to help smokers with their New Years Resolutions”! This despite the fact that numerous scientific reports into the long-term results for NRT prove it is no more successful than willpower alone, with a success range of 2% to 8% – all well within the normal placebo range, and therefore utterly useless. And it’s free only for a week, which is obviously no different from a free sachet of shampoo given away with a magazine. Since when is the U.K. taxpayer supposed to be footing the bill for free samples of useless drug company products? This would be a scandalous waste of precious resources even if there were public money to burn, but as it is… I mean, how many kidney dialysis machines could be bought for that, eh? It’s MENTAL.

Now, quite which government should have their soft, delicate parts jammed in a vice for this piece of out-and-out idiocy, I’m not too sure! Seems a bit soon to have been dreamt up by the new Lib/Con pact, so I suspect this may have been a last gasp of Gordon Brown lunacy but what really made me feel like throwing the sofa through the TV screen last night as this was announced on the BBC Evening News was the appearance of Deborah Arnott from A.S.H. (Action on Smoking & Health) describing this latest cash donation to drug company coffers as “brilliant”. If that moronic marketing ploy is brilliant, Arnott, my wee dog’s an astronomer.

Deborah Arnott’s only reservation, fellow taxpayers, is that it doesn’t go on for long enough. Yeah, you would say that, wouldn’t you Deborah?

Cash In On Smoking And Health

When will the BBC twig that A.S.H. are not REALLY a “Public Health Charity”, which is what they purport to be. If they were, then their decisions and actions would have smokers’ interests at their heart first and foremost, would they not? Yet this was proven to be completely untrue back when Allen Carr died, and Deborah Arnott claimed that specific success rates quoted by Allen Carr’s Easyway International Group were “plucked out of the air” and “basically made up.” Her comments referred to two independent studies conducted by eminent experts in the field of smoking cessation which had already been published in peer reviewed journals indicating a 53% success rate for Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop Smoking Clinics after 12 months. She made these comments whilst on the BBC Radio 4’s “P.M.” programme during a piece looking back on the achievements of Allen Carr. The Easyway Organisation sued, and won because Arnott was completely wrong about that. A.S.H. were forced to make a public apology and pay costs. So, did that make the “public health charity” see the error of its ways, and start promoting Allen Carr’s now-proven method too, and not just drug company products?

No. They just published the obligatory apology and then continued to completely ignore the Allen Carr method, which proves what I, the Easyway Organisation and many others have been saying for years: that ASH is just a shop window for nicotine gum, patches, Zyban and Champix, and it has sod-all to do with public health! It’s just shameless promotion of largely-useless quit products dressed up as “healthcare”.

The Scandalous Strategy

You see, here’s how it works. Nicotine Replacement Poisoning was originally passed as if it were an effective quit smoking aid on the basis of its performance at just SIX WEEKS. The manufacturers were even allowed to put the performance rate at six weeks on the packaging, as if it were indicative of the actual long-term outcome, which it certainly is not. The NHS and the Department of Health currently measure the ‘effectiveness’ of the NHS Stop Smoking Services by the results at four weeks, and then stop following up. Using this clearly-inadequate evaluation method, they have routinely boasted ‘success rates’ of 55% (average around the country) rising as high as 90% in the case of South West Kent PCT (see document reproduced in the Evidence section of this website). Long-term results are never mentioned when these very short-term results are being trumpeted to promote the services, which is grossly misleading.

Yet we now know for sure – having examined the scientific reports into the long-term NHS results that we EVENTUALLY managed to get out of the DoH – that the real outcomes at one year are a miserable 2% – 8%, no different from willpower alone!

The defenders of this policy are now reduced to sheer bluff to fool the public, and this is how they do it. Any spokesperson from ASH, the NHS or the DoH will always begin by telling you how many people are killed by smoking every year – as if that fact had any bearing whatever on the performance of those services and products! It is a smokescreen (no pun intended), to give you the impression that this is so serious a problem that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE – even if it makes no difference whatever and costs a fortune. Then they will blithely assure you that “numerous scientific studies have shown…”, but without letting slip that those were all short-term studies and they create a very false impression. The long-term studies they will not mention at all, except perhaps the Ferguson report, which artificially manufactured a 15% success rate at one year by cherry picking: excluding 20% of the 1039 participants from the final evaluation on the basis of socio-economic factors. In other words, they excluded all those they thought were least likely to quit before they evaluated the results, making a nonsense of that 15% figure!

All this would be quite funny if it were not a massive waste of precious NHS resources, and a shameful waste of smokers’ time, encouraging them to bugger about with bogus products that don’t do anything useful really. No-one knows how much time any individual smoker has got, so wasting any of it is potentially life-threatening, Doc.

ASH & Co – and the BMA, the DoH, the Royal College of Physicians, people like Edzard Ernst et al. – are always banging on in a very smug and pompous fashion about EBM: “evidence-based medicines” which the rest of us know as “drug company products”. Yet we can see from all this that it doesn’t matter what the evidence actually IS! Again, it’s just a marketing ploy: evidence about Allen Carr’s genuine and very respectable SUCCESS is ignored by ASH, yet the clear evidence of NRT abject failure is also ignored, they continue to promote that by sneakily substituting very short-term evaluations to mislead smokers and taxpayers alike.

This is a national scandal. The plug should be pulled immediately and there should be a public enquiry into who is responsible for this outrageous attempt to hoodwink everyone. If those millions were being spent on something like a herbal remedy – something NOT manufactured by a drug company – and it showed a 94% failure rate, the very same people who are defending current the NHS policy would be screaming for the funding to be stopped immediately, and everybody knows it! How long is this madness going to be allowed to continue? I’ve been saying this now for THREE YEARS, and in that time the number of smokers attempting to quit has halved, but the amounts of public money being poured into this farcical NHS pantomime has rocketed from £51 million pounds a year to £84 million last year. Those resources should be spent on things the NHS is actually GOOD AT, and smoking cessation certainly isn’t one of those things, as the science shows very clearly now.

If that is not grounds for a public enquiry, I’d like to know what is!

the book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

safer, more effective alternative

Rachel’s Hypnotherapy Success!

Last night we had a Xmas party for my husbands sports group and it was good to be able to sit inside the whole time but boy did I smell it when the smokers all came back in, I was so happy that wasn’t me anymore… I have been spreading the word on champix usage to my kiwi friends and encouraging them to check out your website. Now that I have had the hypnotherapy I am even a better example to them.

Keep up the brilliant work, have passed Book One on to my Dad and eagerly await Book Two.

by Chris Holmes

Now THIS is what I’m talking about! This is why no-one needs to take a risk with Champix The Suicide Pill:

Hi Chris,

Well I am happy to inform you that I am a non smoker. I had my hypnotherapy session last week and have not picked up a cigarette since nor do I want to. I knew what to expect due to reading your book and doing my own research. I enjoyed the session and was so excited on the day.

While I was waiting to go in for my appointment (I was early) I was chatting to this older man who was outside having a cigarette and waiting for someone else (nothing to do with where I was going). He asked me who I was waiting for and I told him what I was doing. He said he had hypnotherapy in the UK for smoking and then about 10 years later he immigrated to Australia and took up smoking again so in his opinion hypnotherapy didn’t work!, I had a little chuckle and told him it looked to me as if it did work. Anyway he was all excited about starting champix and I told him to make sure he researches it fully, in fact I know a website ……….

He wished me luck as I him, luck that he will not take champix and place himself in danger.

There has been a strange outcome of my quitting smoking that I never saw coming. The reaction of my husband!. While my 23 year old son has been very supportive and is encouraged by my success, my husband is being difficult. He will deliberately annoy me until I am angry and then say things like ” oo getting a bit tetchy I understand” or throwing his Cigarette out the window when I get in the car and saying ” oops, better get rid of that stinky smoke”. I have not been bothered by his smoking at all as I am a non smoker so it has no effect on me. It is as if he is wanting me to fail and has mentioned that he is closely watching how this ‘works’ for me cause he might try it. I just get an uneasy feeling that he is bating me or testing me to see if I will smoke again. I love my husband dearly and can’t quite understand why he is acting like this, although he is easing off a bit now. Chris, have you seen this response from other ex smokers smoking partners before?

Last night we had a Xmas party for my husbands sports group and it was good to be able to sit inside the whole time but boy did I smell it when the smokers all came back in, I was so Happy that wasn’t me anymore

I have been spreading the word on champix usage to my kiwi friends and encouraging them to check out your website. Now that I have had the hypnotherapy I am even a better example to them.

Keep up the brilliant work, have passed book one on to my dad and eagerly await book two.

Kindest regards
Rachel

So I emailed back:

Hi Rachel, well done you! And well done to your hypnotherapist for a sound professional job there! Ask if she would like a namecheck on my blog, I’d be happy to oblige!

I cannot understand the attitude of people like the smoker (or ex-non-smoker!) you met who interpreted starting smoking again years later as a “failure of hypnotherapy”! You would think anyone with any intelligence would return to the therapy that worked for them before, as indeed most people will if they relapse at some stage. It is the logical choice. However, some behaviour and some decisions are not based on logic. There is an urban myth that if you have had hypnotherapy to stop smoking before, it won’t work a second time – which is RUBBISH! But there might be another explanation. Blaming the relapse on hypnotherapy can be a way of avoiding blaming himself. (Actually there’s no need to blame anyone, we can fix it easily. It’s really not a big deal.) Or he may have adopted the notion that the hypnotherapy “wore off” – although that attitude is more common if the relapse happens within the first 12 months, it’s a bit weird to look at it like that after a ten-year interval! Hypnotherapy isn’t a treatment, it’s a communication process, so it cannot “wear off”, but it is always possible for anyone to smoke again. I could start smoking again if I wanted to. Would that be a somewhat late ‘failure’ in my decision to stop thirteen years ago? I think not!

But to start again, one needs a reason. And if you move to another country, like that chap did in moving to Australia, you need friends. And if the new people you meet are smokers, and they offer you a cigarette… even if you don’t want one, it might seem a bit unfriendly to refuse, like you’re rejecting their attempts at hospitality, maybe even seems disapproving? And as former smokers ourselves, we don’t really disapprove of smokers, do we? Most of us don’t anyway. So what harm could one little cigarette do? When circumstances change, and human individuals need new friends and allies – need to feel accepted – they may adopt a behaviour that they would have passed up under different circumstances. It’s a common enough scenario, and it doesn’t matter because it’s easily fixed with another hypnotherapy session!

Why did he not return to hypnotherapy then? Well the therapist he saw before was in another country, so that would mean starting all over again seeking out a different therapist, and… most likely he didn’t really want to believe in hypnotherapy in the first place, was astonished when it worked because that was contrary to his normal world-view – which is probably more inclined to believe in “tablets from the doctor” than anything ‘alternative’ – so when he started again, he just slipped back into his conventional comfort-zone and dismissed hypnotherapy as if it were a failure. What allowed him to succeed with it in the first place was his genuine underlying desire to quit smoking anyway, which we can be sure of because he didn’t relapse for a decade and he is attempting quitting again with the Champix. (All of this is speculation, of course, but these things are common enough.)

This all boils down to the general ignorance and misunderstanding about hypnotherapy which my book aims to dispel, and replace with a general and widespread UNDERSTANDING of it, not just recognition and acceptance. What really holds hypnotherapy back is general ignorance and prejudice. I’ve always thought that the kind of success we would be seeing if everyone already understood hypnotherapy and it enjoyed universal approval and recognition would be nothing short of spectacular. It’s pretty exciting already, as you’ve just been discovering for yourself!

And so to your husband, and his ‘unexpected’ reaction to your success! Yes, I’ve seen it before – in fact I included a case of it in the Case Mysteries in the second volume, a passage under the title of THE DISSUADERS. Sounds like your husband only has a mild case of this though – the case I wrote about was unusually bad because it was systematic and relentless, and unfortunately succeeded in undoing all the good work hypnotherapy did in that case, and I have to admit it did make me angry – but there was nothing I could do about it.

Now, you mustn’t be angry with your husband, because these are Subconscious reactions which some smokers have when someone close to them successfully quits. Usually they are short-term reactions, and the best thing to do is let your natural good humour deal with them because like most grouchy behaviour it shouldn’t be taken too seriously. It is not really malicious in most cases, it is based on fear. You see, back in the day, when ‘everyone’ smoked (as smokers often claim!), the fact that smoking could kill you wasn’t such a worry because we had a feeling that there was safety in numbers and surely it wouldn’t happen to US. And no-one disapproved too much in those days, so we could be fairly comfortable with our smoking habit. You could smoke anywhere, no-one cared, it was regarded as a fairly normal – even fairly respectable – lifestyle thing.

My God how that has changed! Smokers are very much on the back foot now, numbers are dwindling, every year someone else quits, there’s pictures of tumours on the carton, you can’t smoke anywhere in public without being arrested, the latest TV ads in the UK tell you to not only smoke outside, but now you’ve got to take seven steps away from your house before you light up, like you’re fucking radioactive or something… pretty soon you’ll be told you have to take a bus to a remote abandoned quarry before it’s permissible to light up, and be decontaminated and all your clothes burned before you’re allowed to return to your children, dressed in sackcloth and ashes. God knows how my family have survived with my old Dad smoking his pipe in the car with the windows rolled up all through my childhood… I’d like to see someone try to tell him he has to get out of his armchair and take seven steps away from his house before he lights the filthy thing up again. I wouldn’t, I don’t mind him smoking at all. I felt like puking in the car when I was a kid sometimes, but that’s just normal. I’m glad I don’t live in the same house as him, but there are lots of reasons for that. He’s there by himself nowadays, he can smoke if he wants to. He’s 82. He still plays tennis every week. No kidding. The man has virtually no medical records, he never worries about his health.

Not everyone is that health-confident. Smokers get worried these days – not just about illness, but about not being ‘able’, personally, to stop smoking. Each time someone they know quits, it makes them a bit nervous because it starts to seem increasingly ‘wrong’ to be a smoker, increasingly likely that they WILL be the one that gets the smoking-related disease, and that’s why – if the quitting attempt fails, other smokers often feel a private sense of relief, so that the commiserations are also partly a “welcome back” into the fold.

When you decided to quit, it was your decision, not your husband’s decision – but your success throws his own smoking habit into sharp relief, and that brings discomfort. It may well feel threatening, in two ways: now he may feel ‘obliged’ to try to quit himself – but without the freedom to decide that for himself, and with the fear of failing, which haunts a lot of smokers. He may not WANT to quit at this stage, and be fearful that now you’re going to use his smoking habit as a stick to beat him with – even if you were never going to do any such thing! He may be afraid of hypnosis, as a lot of people are even though there is no risk in it whatsoever. And – don’t forget – there is a certain element of competition in all close human relationships, especially male/female partnerships… the old battle of the sexes… which men like to feel that they would always win, only now you’re one up on him… the pressure’s on…

Not much of this goes through a person’s conscious mind. No, it all bubbles away underneath, and just pops up in little snidey comments and unworthy needling behaviour which is actually aimed at tipping you back into smoking so that he doesn’t have to change or be affected by any of these shifts in the usual state of affairs… but he may not realise that these are the typical causes of this moody phase. And it doesn’t matter, as long as you just smile at the insecurity of men and don’t taunt him about it or indeed take it seriously at all. Just ignore it, forgive him for being normal and it will peter out soon enough, especially if you are tolerant about his habit and don’t beat him up about it (always a mistake). Remember, his smoking habit should have no bearing on your own preference to be a non-smoker – don’t decide that he’s got to quit too now, and don’t hit back. Just enjoy your freedom and leave him to deal with his own issues himself in his own good time. Don’t let the smoking issue drive a wedge between you, because I think we all had the right idea in the old days – smoking is no big deal. But it IS rubbish, which should always be the reason any smoker quits, and it should always be of their own accord.

Is it okay if I put some of this up on the website? Also, let me know the name of your hypnotherapist and her location, so I can promote her services for her! And once again: Well Done Rachel!!!! Enjoy your freedom, and your health.

best regards,
Chris

To which our new non-smoker replied:

Hi Chris, thank you again for your most informative email. My husband seems to be backing off a bit now, in fact this morning he even mentioned how ‘nice’ I have been lately lol. He is the one who first mentioned quitting smoking it’s just that I was the one who did something about it. I know he wants to quit but it has to be when he is ready, not just because I did. I certainly never say anything about it to him, he’s a big boy now.

That man I met who said hypnotherapy didn’t work for him, after ten years of complete success really made me chuckle, some people never fail to amaze me, the frightening thing is, he is happy to be going on Champix. I liked your explanation of his behavior, it makes sense.

I am always happy for you to use my emails on your site if you feel they are appropriate.

The hypnotherapist I saw was:

Barbara Hennessy
www.hypnotherapycentre.com.au
email: [email protected]

PO Box 748
Wynnum. Qld. 4178
Australia.

Chris, I will contact her and ask her permission as requested. [It was granted.]

Have a very Merry Christmas and a safe New Year. Keep up all the good work, you changed my life, if your website hadn’t have been available I probably would never even thought of using hypnotherapy for quitting smoking. If your book wasn’t written, I would have only had my suspicions that NRT doesn’t work instead of the proof and knowledge I now have. If you had just ignored my emails I may have been put off by the whole thing as if you were just someone who wants to makes money… instead you have always promptly answered my enquiries in a thorough and humorous manner, supporting me through this turning point in my life. Thanks Chris!!! As is my way now I will continue to support your campaign in any way I am able.

Kindest regards
Rachel

Rachel told me that she had contacted two hypnotherapists at first, and decided on Barbera because the other therapist was charging too much:

Hi Chris,
I am seeing the hypnotherapist on the 17th of December and can’t wait to finally be free from this behaviour. She has 40 years of experience and the cost is $AU130, I contacted an ad from the local paper and the guy was charging $AU600 for the initial session and $AU400 for the follow up session (which I really shouldn’t need).

This confirms what I always say to smokers: Don’t pay top dollar. Do not assume that if you pay high prices you will get the best therapy, it isn’t true at all. I’m pretty good at what I do, but I don’t overcharge. My stop smoking sessions are £120. There are a few therapists in the UK charging as much as £450, but that just means that they are more interested in your money than your well-being, so don’t go to them! Do what Rachel did, go for experience and reasonable rates, that’s where you’ll find the magic.

For any smokers in the North West of the UK: Central Hypnotherapy

Depression, Champix: Doctor, NO!

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply to my email and you may certainly reproduce it on your website using my full name, I’m happy to support your campaign as much as I can. I will also write a review on Lulu for the book. I always read the reviews so it is nice to have a recent one to read when making a decision.
Chris, I look forward to purchasing Vol. II and my dad is eagerly waiting for me to finish Vol. I so he can read it too ( he doesn’t smoke) as he is very interested in the smoke and mirrors that health professionals/Pharmaceutical companies pass off as fact to the public all in the name of profits.

*Update: If you or a loved one has suffered a bad reaction to Champix and you are based in the U.K., you can report it to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) here. The more people do that the clearer the true picture will become. Protect others! Report it.*

Rachel Whalen wrote:
Hi Chris,
I have had clinical depression from a very young age and over the years have
found a medication that lets me live a normal life. I work in an interesting
field (forensics) and have a loving home and family life. My doctor who issues
me with my medication offered, quite sincerely, to give me a script for Champix
to assist me when I asked about giving up the smokes. I was shocked that she
would do this knowing my history. Needless to say I told her I would get back to
her on that and promptly went home and started researching Champix in earnest
which is how I came across you site. I ordered your book from Lulu.com and am
now half way through it. What you are saying makes total sense to me and I have
chosen a reputable hypnotherapist which I will be seeing in a few weeks. I am
really looking forward to stopping smoking and getting rid of that compulsive
behaviour the safe way. I can only imagine the kind of hell I could have
experienced had I just blindly took my doctors offer. Thank you, Chris.

Just in case anyone still doesn’t know, Champix should NOT be prescribed to anyone with a history of depression according to current medical guidelines. These are not the only smokers that have been severely affected by “psychiatric events” whilst taking Champix, but the risk is certainly higher. So why the hell is this happening over and over again all over the world? Don’t doctors bother to read the guidelines?

Anyway, I asked Rachel if it was okay to reproduce her email here – anonymously if she preferred, to which she replied today:

Hi Chris,

Ah, splendid. It seems the Truth Will Out Campaign is getting its message across to the public, if not the medical profession. In this case, the patient was fortunately more clued-up about the medication than the Doctor. Scary, that, isn’t it?

Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was (Volume II: A Change of Mind) is available now as an ebook, a pdf or a paperback. The Nicotine Myth is doomed, it is only a matter of time now.

the hypnotherapy option

Cravings Are Not Withdrawal Symptoms

by Chris Holmes

** Update 16/07.10: There is a link in the third comment at the end of this article to the website of Action on Smoking and Health (A.S.H.) which refers to a study on cravings that confirms exactly what I’m talking about here. God knows I never expected ASH to confirm or agree with anything I say, because they have staunchly defended and promoted Nicotine Replacement products until now, but maybe everyone involved in that is getting ready to admit that NRT is a complete waste of money because it’s based on a myth, just as I’ve been saying all along. Now watch them immediately start promoting some other pharmaceutical instead, instead of admitting openly how WRONG they were all this time about hypnotherapy, the Allen Carr approach, acupuncture… no, it’s chemicals, chemicals chemicals all the way!

Anyway enjoy the article!

Cravings Are Not Withdrawal Symptoms

Whether you are a smoker or not, you know what a craving is because we all get lots of cravings, they are not all about tobacco. In hypnotherapy we shut down cravings for all sorts of things routinely: smoking is just one example of that. If anyone reading this doesn’t believe that it is simply because they haven’t experienced it themselves, but it’s an everyday occurence for hypnotherapists – I’ve been doing this for the last ten years. Easily demonstrated too.

For several decades now, smokers have had it drilled into them that smoking is “nicotine addiction, nicotine addiction, nicotine addiction”. Yet for most of the time people have been smoking tobacco in Europe it has simply been regarded as a filthy habit. Odd references to “addiction” have occured down the ages but that is partly due to the unclear meaning of the term, which has often been confused with Compulsive Habit anyway. But I can easily explain why smokers’ cravings cannot possibly be withdrawal symptoms and are not related to nicotine levels in the blood anyway.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I know from my own experience as a smoker in the past that trying to quit smoking with willpower alone – or with nicotine replacement products, Zyban or Champix – CAN be a real struggle, or even seem impossible. According to the U.K. Government’s own commissioned studies into the long-term outcomes of those methods (which the National Health Service recommend) the chances are very much that your success – if any – will be temporary. What smokers don’t realise is, that is NOT because it is really hard to stop smoking, it is because those methods are all based on a myth: “addiction” to nicotine.

If cravings were withdrawal symptoms you would experience them at their worst when the nicotine level was lowest, which would be first thing in the morning if you are a typical smoker. No nicotine has been taken into the body for hours, so those “nicotine receptors” should be “going crazy” the moment you’re awake. Yet most smokers do not even keep tobacco by the bed. So there is a gap – an elapse of time – between the moment they open their eyes, and the moment when they first light up a cigarette.

Of course, there are a few smokers who light up before they get out of bed but I think everyone is aware that this is not the norm. The majority of habitual smokers will normally get up, go to the bathroom, maybe have a shower, go downstairs, put the kettle on, feed the cat… all the time feeling perfectly normal. They are not climbing the walls desperate for nicotine. But why not? They haven’t had any nicotine for hours! IF THE URGE TO SMOKE WAS REALLY A WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOM, THAT WOULD BE THEIR WORST MOMENT.

Also, many smokers feel an urge to pick up a cigarette when they have just put one out, such as when drinking, socialising or if bored. That urge is compelling, but it cannot be withdrawal because the nicotine level in the blood is still high from the previous cigarette. A “withdrawal symptom” is an experience caused by nicotine withdrawing from the system, which only happens later. Another clear indicator is the fact that the urge to smoke will vanish in particular circumstances regardless of falling nicotine levels: many smokers never smoke outside or in the street, so if they go out shopping they don’t want one. Gardening, playing sports… hours may go by, nicotine levels fall away – no symptoms, no “withdrawal”. This is because cravings are not linked to nicotine levels at all. They are compulsive urges prompting the usual habitual behaviour, but ONLY if it is a) possible, b) appropriate and c) convenient.

So if you get on a plane – as long as you’re okay with flying and don’t seriously object to the smoking restriction – you will find that nicotine levels can fall and keep on falling, and hey presto! No pesky withdrawal symptoms! Likewise if you board a bus, ride on a train, walk into Sainsburys or a cathedral, step into an operating theatre or meet the Queen… the brain knows this is NOT A SMOKING OPPORTUNITY so it doesn’t send the signals until you LEAVE that situation and a smoking opportunity presents itself.

Now, I need hardly point out that the social restrictions I’ve just described require INTELLIGENCE, SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND DISCERNMENT to distinguish between, and I doubt if any scientist is going to suggest that the nicotine receptors in the brain possess such complex abilities such as would be required to appreciate the shifting rules and mores of modern society. No, they were simply supposed to “go crazy” due to the falling level of nicotine specifically – NOT the fact that you’re chatting to the Queen, halfway to Cyprus or admiring a beautiful stained-glass window.

Real drug addictions are totally different. If a heroin addict gets on a plane and the level of heroin in the blood falls low THEN THEY ARE ILL, it doesn’t matter where they are or what they are doing. They couldn’t make out like they were fine even if they were talking to HRH.

Interested? Want to know more about what’s really going on with cravings? Click on the Read The Book section of the site, and when the Contents page appears, read a bit more. If you want to read all of it, click on Buy The Book. £16.95 for the paperback, or just £5 for the full download version. If you don’t like buying on-line, contact me directly for the other options.

I shut down smoking habits in a single session routinely. You can’t do that with a heroin addiction. I’ve tried. If you smoke tobacco you are NOT a drug addict, and that’s why the nicotine-based approaches rarely work except in the short-term. And that’s down to willpower mainly. The real solution is hypnotherapy, and there will come a time when that is simply common knowledge and everyone will understand that all this endless hype about “nicotine addiction” was just a simple mistake which turned into a gigantic moneyspinner for the drug companies at the taxpayers’ expense.

Lennox Johnston – Nicotine Man!

Lennox Johnston was largely responsible for tobacco smoking being wrongly classed as a drug addiction when it is, in fact, a complex compulsive habit. At first, the medical profession were sure he was wrong. They should have stuck to that position, because he WAS wrong. See Chris Holmes’ book ‘Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was’ for the full story.

An excerpt from Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was (Volume II: A Change Of Mind) by Chris Holmes

ii). The tobacco story has so many curious twists and turns that I am never really surprised when another one pops up. In Volume One I mentioned that I hadn’t quite managed to discover exactly when the “nicotine addiction” story started, as an interpretation of compulsive use and I suggested that if anyone was intrigued about that then they should keep digging and if they found anything enlightening to let me know. This inspired Chepstow-based hypnotherapist Marc Bishop to investigate further and he contacted me recently to tell me about Lennox Johnston, of whom I had never heard.

The fact that I had never heard of him is interesting in itself, because it turns out that Lennox Johnston – and be honest, you’ve never heard of him either, right? – was the first person to use nicotine in isolation to offset the impulse to reach for tobacco. In other words he invented Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) – the very thing my book denounces. Now, NRT is prescribed and sold all over the world, so if we all know about innovators like Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur, how come Lennox Johnston is never mentioned when people talk about NRT?

Actually it is probably because he was a bit like me: he made a bit of a nuisance of himself and everybody thought at first that he was wrong… which causes me to feel a certain, odd kinship with the chappie even though he is very much my adversary in this argument, for am I not in a very similar position here, trying to explain why smoking is not what most people presently think it is? Here is an extract from Johnston’s typical pronouncements to the editor of The Lancet circa 1953:

“I think it more sensible and scientifically satisfying to recognise tobacco-smoking as a drug addiction from start to finish. It varies in degree from slight to serious. The euphemism “habit” should be discarded completely… no smoker derives positive pleasure and benefit from tobacco. The bliss of headache or toothache relieved is analogous to that of craving for tobacco appeased.”

It is immediately clear that Allen Carr’s later observations in The Easy Way To Stop Smoking have their origins here in Lennox Johnston’s view, although I doubt Carr had ever heard of him either. He certainly never mentioned him in any of his own writings to my knowledge.

So what did the medical profession think of Johnston’s insistence that tobacco smoking was a drug addiction in the 1950’s? Well, we have managed to find this frank repudiation by none other than the Honorary Secretary of the Society for the Study of Addiction, one H. Pullar-Strecker, in response to Johnston’s assertions:

“Much as one may ‘crave’ for one’s smoke, tobacco is no drug of addiction. Proper addicts… will stop at nothing to obtain the drug that their system demands imperatively.”

Smokers often tell me that they are puzzled by the fact that although they wouldn’t normally go for nine hours without a cigarette during the day, when they are on a plane it doesn’t seem to bother them until they land, or very shortly before they land. The only exceptions seem to be smokers who resent the restriction, or have a problem with flying anyway. Likewise we hear of smokers seemingly untroubled by cravings during a spell in hospital, or more ordinarily whenever they go anywhere where smoking is commonly accepted as being out of the question, such as Mothercare or the Finsbury Park Mosque. It seems that as long as the smoker accepts that restriction, there will be no urge to smoke until they leave that situation. That is certainly not withdrawal, and falling nicotine levels in the body during the nine-hour flight (for example) are clearly irrelevant. The “nicotine receptors” in the brain are hardly in a position to appreciate the smoking ban on aircraft – or observe it – so this certainly begs the question “Why are they not ‘going crazy’ – as the NRT advert would have us believe is the cause of smokers’ cravings – in all of the situations mentioned above?” For of course Pullar-Strecker was right: the heroin addict cannot do that. If a heroin addict gets on a plane and the heroin level in the blood falls low then they are ill, it doesn’t matter what they are doing or where they are situated. That’s withdrawal.

Lennox Johnston was a Glaswegian GP who had been a smoker himself and according to his obituary in the British Medical Journal (Volume 292, dated 29/03/86) he quit smoking twice. It relates how he pondered his compulsion to continue smoking and “wondered what would be the effect of stopping” – only to find that it proved easier than he expected. A year or so later, he started smoking again and after that it took him “two agonising years” to give up.

Later he became an anti-smoking campaigner and began to experiment with pure solutions of nicotine which he often administered to himself, once with near-fatal consequences. He also wrote to The Lancet describing an experiment he devised himself which involved about thirty smokers who apparently allowed him to inject them with nicotine whenever they felt the urge to reach for tobacco, which Johnston claimed then subsided. Although this certainly does not qualify as a bona fide clinical trial, it can be regarded as the first ever attempt to trial nicotine replacement as a concept. The Lancet published Johnston’s letter, and so began the biggest medical mistake of the 20th Century – though of course, everyone thought he was wrong at the time.

Well – not quite everyone. Throughout the history of tobacco-smoking in Europe there have been occasional voices calling it an “addiction”, though quite what those individuals thought that term really meant is not easy to determine now. Yet for most of that history nearly everybody simply regarded it as a filthy habit – which is pretty accurate. A complex compulsive habit to be exact – for a full definition of that see Chapter Ten in Volume One, where I spell out the key differences between that and true drug addiction.

It is only very recently, in fact, that the “nicotine addiction” interpretation has become the general impression, and not everyone believes it even now. There have always been voices in the scientific community who have pointed out the inconsistencies, but they couldn’t explain the compulsive element because they didn’t have the key knowledge of the normal operations of the human Subconscious mind and how it organises and activates compulsive habitual behaviour. So they got shouted down – as did the tobacco companies who tried to point out that other habitual behaviours that did not involve any substances – such as shopaholics and compulsive gamblers – seemed to be of a similar order, but eventually they too accepted the new doctrine and dropped the argument. Not because it was invalid, but because they were pretty much on their own at that point, the anti-smokers were on a roll and have been ever since.

Factually, the tobacco companies were right… but because smoking is damaging to health they didn’t have a chance of getting their point heard as the scientific proof of real harm emerged during the 1960s and has continued to be the justification for everything that has changed since. Every anti-smoking policy or restriction that has been introduced since then has been justified with a reminder of the enormous harm tobacco smoking does to human health.

It’s a pity it never occurred to Lennox Johnston to wonder why he found it surprisingly easy to quit the first time, but it took “two agonising years” the second time. Surely the role of nicotine was the same in both cases and what that gives us straight away is the clue that nicotine isn’t the difficulty: the perception of ‘ease’ or ‘difficulty’ – even ‘agony’ – results from other variables, and that’s why expert hypnotherapy can usually resolve the matter on a single occasion but NRT does not.

The medical establishment thought Johnston was wrong, in fact they ignored him for years and don’t even talk about him now. The tobacco companies thought it was just a habit, as did virtually all smokers at the time. Some still do, despite all this mad nicotine propaganda that is really just marketing for NRT dressed up as medical orthodoxy.

The irony is, the medical establishment were in fact quite correct in the first place. So now it seems as if I’m the mad eccentric, when all I’m pointing out is exactly what everyone knew anyway before Lennox Johnston came along. If they had only stuck to their initial assessment that he was the mad eccentric, then they could have remained quite correct all along and we could have avoided this crazy detour around and around and around the poison nicotine, which is not the real reason people struggle to quit through their own efforts, as I explained in Volume One.

Lennox Johnston lived until he was 86, surviving long enough to see his initially-scorned pronouncements adopted as the standard medical view. By mistake.

Doubt if I will live long enough to see it corrected. Probably won’t get the credit either – but then, neither did Johnston -which is why none of us had ever heard of him!

more info about hypnotherapy for smoking